The Curse Servant (The Dark Choir Book 2) (10 page)

“Just wine.”

He pulled the cork and poured me a glass. “So, a man in my position comes to notice a thing or two when he’s doing little else but pouring drinks and listening to worthless assholes like you complain all night.”

“Do tell?”

“And a man like me would notice that you haven’t been patronizing our club to its fullest potential.”

“I’ve been busy.”

“How are you and Bright doing lately?”

“Again, busy.”

He lifted a brow, and I wilted.

“It’s been better.”

“Honeymoon’s over, huh?”

“We went straight to our bitter golden years, but thanks for asking.” I added after taking a sip, “No, it’s just we both have eyes on our own specific prizes.”

“What, you got a new job?”

“Not that kind of prize.”

Ben pulled a stool from under the bar and settled his girth upon it. “I knew it!”

“Jesus.”

“Who’s the lucky girl?”

“Lucky isn’t the first word that comes to mind.”

“Shut up. Name.”

“Francesca.”

“Local girl?”

“Not really. She’s in college.”

His brow lifted.

“What?” I spat.

“Nothing. You’re, what? Thirty-five?”

“How do you know my age?”

Ben gave me a smug, tight-lipped grin.

I shrugged. “The age difference isn’t that significant. I mean, it won’t be when we’re both in our forties. At least, when she’s in her forties.”

“Going to bring her here?”

“Saturday night.”

“Wow. Must be serious.”

“It really isn’t.”

“You’re bringing her to this place, Dorian. That’s like bringing her to meet your parents, and you know it.”

I leaned back on the bar stool and took another long quaff of wine. Ben gave me a warm, knowing smile and withdrew to attend to another customer. I watched him work for a while. He was terrifyingly out of shape. He was the kind of man you could imagine dining on two slices of bread soaked in bacon grease every night with a pack of cigarettes and a nightcap. He always listened to me, and he never withdrew his approval from me. Even during all the unpleasantness with Carmen.

But I hadn’t realized how much I cared what he thought about me until I had someone for him to meet.

I retired to the room for a bit of brain-numbing conversation with the others. I stumbled into a deep, emotional argument over the proposed gas tax, and managed to stay far from mayoral topics. Though I could tell from keeping my ear pressed to the ground why Julian had been avoiding the Club. This had become Sooner’s audience in a big way. Happily I wasn’t publically linked to Sullivan. Hopefully it would remain that way.

After draining my wine glass, I wandered back to the bar to get my own refill. The girls were giving me a wide berth, and for good reason. Their new house mother had warned them about what had happened between Carmen and me. It seemed I was on a blacklist among the working girls in the Club, and it suited me fine. That particular service of the club hadn’t been sitting well with me for a while now.

I stepped past the dark side of the room before the single lamp lit inside registered in my brain. A chill trickled down my neck as I stopped mid-stride. Backing up a couple steps, I spotted a familiar figure seated in one of the wingbacks, smoke from his cigar wreathing his head.

It was the man I called Mr. Brown. I’d had run-ins with agents of the Presidium in the past, but Mr. Brown was the only bona fide Presidium member to date who had spoken with me in person.

If he was here to see me, I couldn’t ignore him. I set the wine glass down on a planter and ventured inside the dim room.

“Have a seat, Mister Lake.”

I complied, trying not to give Brown any reason to take offense.

“How have you been?” I asked, dutifully weeding out any trace of sarcasm as I took a seat across him.

“You’ve kept us busy as of late, Mister Lake.”

“Have I?” A little sarcasm may have crept into that one.

He stared at me from beneath those snow white eyebrows, a sneer creeping onto the mouth buried inside his ivory beard.

“The Baltimore mayoral campaigns don’t garner much attention inside the Capitol Beltway, which is good news for you.”

“Then this is a social visit?”

“As I’ve said before, there are associates within our organization which feel you represent a real opportunity to forward our mission. There are others, however, who consider you to be reckless in the extreme. Stubborn. Arrogant. And dangerously uninformed.”

“I cancelled my subscription to Newsweek.” Okay, I couldn’t fight the sarcasm anymore. He was starting to piss me off.

Mr. Brown’s eyes bored holes through my head, and I shifted in my seat.

“Also, callously flippant.”

“Sorry.”

“Until recently your affairs haven’t compelled us to take action. Hence our relatively benign conversation. The regrettable fact is this all could have been avoided.”

“What could have been avoided?”

“Oh, where to begin? You’ve insinuated yourself into the election of a major public figure. You’ve met in broad daylight with the Deputy Mayor on more than one occasion to discuss sensitive esoteric matters. Trading with inconsequential corporate accountants is one thing, but a man who is viewed as holding the political marionette strings for a major U.S. city is quite another. And when faced with a genuine metaphysical crisis, rather than coming to us, you’ve resorted to your own paltry miseducation and fly-by-wire hermetic gimmickry. On what level did you feel we were ever going to ignore this?”

My blood pressure raquetballed from vessel-bursting anger to piss-my-pants fainting levels.

“The Presidium is getting involved?”

“More accurately, we’ve already involved ourselves and the matter is dealt with. The Sun and The Charm City Spectator threatened to expose hermetic activity close to a seat of political power. We simply can’t let that happen.” Brown cocked his head. “This can’t be news to you.”

My stomach dropped to my knees.

He took a long puff on his cigar. “Dangerously uninformed seems a bit on-the-nose.”

My brain rewound the conversation a few seconds as I rose to my feet. I inched back into the main room as Brown looked on.

“Mister Lake? This could have gone differently. Please try to remember that in the coming weeks.”

I withdrew into the room and hustled over to the bar. I gripped the bar rail as I scanned the television hanging in the corner. All I could see were cars festooned in corporate logos taking several hundred left turns. Ben wandered over to me and coughed discretely into his sleeve.

“Another?”

“Can I get the news?”

“It won’t be on for another hour-some. What’s up?”

“Don’t know. Just expecting bad news, I suppose.”

I waited at the bar for that hour-some, not speaking a word to anyone. By the time I realized what Brown was going on about, the room was largely empty.

There was a massive pileup on the Jones Falls Expressway. It was a tragedy. An entire family had been killed when their car spun out from road debris. They speculated it was gravel from a poorly secured dump truck. A man, his wife, and two young daughters were killed upon impacting an overpass support column.

Cecil Rawls deserved better than that. His children sure as shit deserved better. Whatever poor bastard at The Charm City Spectator that probably met with a sudden, tragic demise did, too.

In one of those moments I generally regret later, I marched back to the side room. Brown was gone.

I stared into the shadows, and spotted something flickering just beneath the wingbacks. Something small, withdrawing its impish legs before I could quite see it directly. The entire room seemed to crawl with malevolence. The shadows twitched like a fly-covered horse. They were getting restless.

Things could have gone differently, Brown had said. It could have been an Audi wrapped around that support column.

But still… two little girls.

As I drove home with remarkable vigilance, I put a great deal of thought into my current vocational situation. Politics simply wasn’t agreeing with me. It certainly didn’t agree with Cecil. I couldn’t withdraw myself from Julian’s employ without a great deal of crow-eating and self-debasement. But wouldn’t that have been preferable to seeing more innocent people eliminated for the sake of hermetic expediency?

As I turned off the freeway into downtown, I spotted the tops of Harborside Towers and remembered what Cecil had told me. This wasn’t simple politics. This was a quiet takeover of a city. I was certain Cecil would have done everything he could to protect his family from the inherent dangers he must have sensed lay in his line of work. And yet he persisted. Now that he was gone, I had a choice to make. I could let Brown muscle me out of the campaign, or I could try to honor Cecil’s memory by continuing his work.

Perhaps I was simply being too sloppy? I had been too distracted with finding my soul. I let myself get photographed. I wandered up to the front of City Hall with damning photographs in a conspicuous envelope. This was as much my fault as anyone’s.

I had to focus.

I had to get my soul back.

Happily, I was hours away from catching a flight to Oregon, and with any luck at all, I’d finally have a means to find it.

was musing on what reason the city of Portland, Oregon, decided to put a mountain at the end of their airport runway as our plane touched down. I had visited the Pacific Northwest only one time before, some six years ago when I helped Edgar negotiate a purchase of a Han Dynasty altarpiece. I remembered it had never stopped raining the entire time I was there. It was that constant, drizzly misting rain that drove me to the end of my ragged nerves. As we sidled up to the concourse, I was relieved to find endless sunlight bathing the city of Portland.

I secured a cab ride across the Willamette and into the downtown Westside. As the cab crossed one of the dozen-odd bridges spanning the river, my phone rang.

It was Julian.

“Hey, Julian.”

“Dorian.”

“This whole thing with the photos has been taken care of.”

“How do you mean?”

“Trust me, and I mean you really have to accept this when I say it… you don’t want to know.”

“Granted.” After a long pause, he continued, “So, I’m here at Gordon’s.”

“Having a late lunch?”

“Where are you?”

I blinked away the question. “Oregon.”

“The state?”

“Yeah, that one.”

“That’s funny because it’s kind of hard to make a meeting here at Gordon’s when you’re in the state of Oregon.”

Shit.

“Right. That… that was today.”

“I know we had a lot of back-and-forth in the last couple days, Dorian, but I had some people I wanted you to meet.”

“Sorry, Julian. I… shit. Yeah, that’s on me.”

“This would almost be funny if this wasn’t basically our standard operating procedure at this point.”

I rammed my head into the cab’s upholstery a couple times. “I didn’t―I just forgot. I’m not blowing you off.”

“And I had people here for an hour and a half.”

“How many ways can I apologize here?”

He went silent for a while.

“Julian?”